Call of Duty Black Ops V- A Twisted History
by DJJD2184
Summary: This connects the Call of Duty: Black Ops I, II, III, and IIII games into a "short" story for a somewhat-canon fifth game. Basically the premise, as I suspected Black Ops IIII was hinting at with its cutscenes, was that everything you thought was going on in the series is wrong, and puts together a new twist. The protagonist is Lucy Mason (Alex Mason's granddaughter).


CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS IIII: A TWI5TED HI5TORY

Here they were, in the Coalescence headquarters, in a room full of blindingly bright lights, several massive supercomputers with futuristic-looking cybernetically controllable UIs on their consoles, and soon-to-be corpses being experimented on in containment pods.

"Lucy, wake up, damn it!" yelled Hendricks.

"That's not my name," said Taylor.

"Yes, it is, Lucy," said Hendricks, "and fucking Freddie over here can explain it. He better or else I'm gonna blow his brains out!"

"Please stop calling me that, Hendricks," said Sebastian Krueger.

"Why? I don't see much of a difference, what with you _killing Alex Mason's great-granddaughter in her dreams_ and all."

"You think you're in control here, Hendricks?" said Sebastian, laughing. "You realize you're outnumbered? All your former friends are gone, some of them by your own hand. As for 'Taylor' here… Taylor, I suppose you're actually where you think you're standing right now."

"What the fuck are you talking about? Stop talking in riddles!" yelled Taylor.

"But as for Lucy Mason… the last remaining heir to the Mason legacy…" grinned Krueger, "she's actually over in that pod over there, dreaming that she's somewhere else. Some_one_ else."

"_What?_" said Taylor.

"You're dead, Taylor." said Krueger. "You nearly killed Lucy. You ripped out your Direct Neural Interface in a futile attempt to spare her. Hendricks shot you in a futile attempt to spare you from her."

"Once she was given cybernetic surgery- again— in a futile attempt to heal her body and her mind— she and Kane came to try and stop us once and for all. Of course, you saw what happened to Kane. Or did you? It wasn't some fucking hivemind named after a bird that killed Kane. It was Lucy. _She's _our real hivemind."

"It's a shame, Taylor," said another unknown person as they walked close to the end of the shadows in the observation deck above the room. "Lucy never really liked us, being the typical disobedient Mason child. You and Kane were like parents to her. No wonder she thinks she's you right now."

"Shit!" yelled Hendricks, who pulled the trigger on Krueger out of desperation.

Taylor then shot Hendricks. In disbelief, he just stared at Hendricks' corpse bleeding out on the floor, the holes in his skin and armor revealing his cybernetic endoskeleton underneath. "Why did I do that?"

"Thank you for that, Lucy, dear," said another person, this one female, who was also in the observation deck. "Mommy's proud of you."

Then the observation deck's lights came on.

Taylor stood there in disbelief. "You're Alex and Savannah Meyer."

"Coalescence was merely a subsidiary of our real corporation. The world's first megacorporation. Of course, we won't say what it's called," said Alex Meyer.

"You think you've been fighting on the right side of history this whole time, Taylor? Well, you're right in the amoral sense- history is written by the victors, after all." said Savannah.

"Shit," said Taylor, as he walked over to Lucy's containment pod. He saw her inside. She was in her birthday suit, sound asleep. "Lucy…"

"Jessica was never her real mother. She just wanted to believe that because of her situation. And so we let her," said Savannah.

Taylor bowed his head down toward the containment pod's glass, breathing angrily.

"Let her out," he said, grimacing.

"If you want her to get out of that pod, you're going to have to be the one to let her out. Out of her own head. Out of the head you think is yours." said Savannah. "I assume you know what classical and operant conditioning are, Taylor."

_Why do I sense more crazy bad guy monologues coming…_ a pissed off Taylor thought.

"We managed to pry Lucy away from Jessica and the rest of the Special 18 in the Altai Mountains in Russia, AKA what you thought of as Ethiopia. She thought she had saved them; they were hostages, being marked for death by the Common Defense Pact at one of their most confidential bases in the world. She volunteered for the mission. Despite that she got her cybernetic arms ripped off by a robot—which were easily replaceable with newer, better ones— she rescued them… from the CDP, at least. She thought that was the real mission."

"In reality, we were merely finishing off the CDP. That plane you downed with the Direct Energy Air Defense systems? As a 'distraction'? It was full of the members of the CDP's high council, along with other high value targets. That room you killed the power to in order to kill all those enemies in the dark on your way to extraction? That was a secret CDP government bunker where they were holding- or rather, were going to hold—an emergency summit. The CDP lost the third cold war, and so we managed to bring about a new world order once more."

"In addition, Lucy was told to hack a server there while 'in the dark'—mentally, rather than physically, containing a data magnitude beyond yottabytes worth of intelligence; enough to demonize the CDP in the eyes of the world and dissolve its factions into nations, and its nations into anarchy. Chaos that we promised we would bring order to. That was why we told her to move to extraction point B—the server was on the way there. She risked her life and defeated countless waves of enemies trying to glean the intel from that server. And she nearly lost her life on the way to extraction. She ended a war, nearly single-handedly, while you, Dylan Stone, Alice Conrad, Javier Ramirez, Joseph Fierro, Hendricks, Kane, and the others had to escort the Special 18 out of there, thinking that was the real mission as well. In the typical sense, she's a heroine."

_Damn it,_ said Taylor, as he remembered Ethiopia, but the memory was beginning to become distorted, _they're fucking with my mind!_

"Then, you brought her back here to Zurich for emergency lifesaving cybernetic surgery. That was her third time she was augmented. She's pretty much a human Terminator by now, if you want to call her human at this point. At most, she's transhuman, at least… Anyway, it was a bad idea to bring her here, but we knew you'd have it," said Alex Meyer.

"We sent the Special 18 and Lucy to the black site in the Coalescence headquarters' basement in Zurich, where we experimented on them. Put the final touches on our hivemind, MONARCH-V, and uploaded their minds to it, where they fought each other to the death over and over again to see who had the strongest mind, in several simulations, the largest of which was called Blackout. 'Project Corvus' really was called Project Metamorphosis," said Savannah.

"This is where the fun part comes in," said Alex, "the part about conditioning. We tortured them by injecting electricity and agonizing memory simulations into their DNIs until their minds left reality. You think being shocked on the outside of your body hurts? Try being shocked in your nerves directly, from the inside-out. We put them through agonizing trials until they could no longer think, feel, or do anything but what we wanted them to."

"Erin "Battery" Baker, Donnie "Ruin" Walsh, Jarrah "Crash" Bazley, Kerk "Ajax" Rossouw, Katsumi "Recon" Kimura, Kieran "Torque" Mackay, Krystof "Firebreak" Hejek, He "Seraph" Zhen-Zhen, Tavo "Nomad" Rojas, David "Prophet" Wilkes, Alessandra "Outrider" Castillo, Experimental War Robot 115, which called itself "Reaper", Leni "Zero" Vogel, the cybernetic archetypes of Alex Mason, Frank Woods, Raul Menendez, and Viktor Reznov. And of course, my sister, Jessica, also known as Spectre… Despite all the pain and the deaths… Lucy was the one who came out the last woman standing," said Savannah.

"And now, the Special 18, along with all the people and stories as they were told to Lucy that she's come to know and love, of various black operations gone wrong… they're all in her head, and they're wrong. Everything she's ever known is a lie. Everything _you_ have ever known is a lie, Lucy," said Alex.

Furious, Taylor screamed and began firing his MR6 handgun at the observation deck, only for it to barely put a dent in the glass.

"You're wasting your ammo, Lucy," said Savannah, "this glass is thicker and less penetrable than your endoskeleton. You'll want to conserve it."

"Shut up!" yelled Taylor.

"You've been a good girl for us, though, Lucy, in an odd sort of way. So, we thought we'd do you a favor before you black out again. We're going to tell you the truth about our family's history, how it really was. Before we wipe it from your mind again and you continue to believe the lie."

Realizing the extent of what was going on, John began to bang on the glass of the containment pod as his body began to disappear. "Lucy, wake up!" said John. "I know you're in pain, but you have to wake up! They're about to do something bad to you and the rest of the entire world! Are you still in there, Lucy! Do you hear me! Wake up! Stay with me, soldier…"

"Put yourself into the shoes of your great-grandfather for a moment, Lucy," said Savannah. Listen only to the sound of my voice. Let your mind relax. Let your thoughts drift. Let the bad memories fade. Let peace be upon you. Surrender yourself to your dreams. Let them wash over you like the gentle waves of the bluest ocean. Let them envelop you. Comfort you…"

Then something strange began to happen as John Taylor began to scream and collapse on the floor, having a cybernetically-induced seizure as his DNI went haywire.

"_Imagine somewhere calm. Imagine somewhere safe. Imagine yourself in a frozen forest. You're standing in a clearing. Trees around you so tall, they touch the sky. Pure white snowflakes fall all around. You can feel them melt on your skin. You are not cold. It cannot overcome the warmth of your beating heart. Can you hear it? You only have to listen."_ Lucy was softly speaking the words herself now.

While Lucy's imaginary friend, "the Player," was off in their imaginary place of healing known as "the Frozen Forest", Lucy was going back through her entire family's twisted history.

Starting with Alex Mason's story.

Scared, she found herself strapped to a chair in a dark basement filled with TV screens showing pictures of the Frozen Forest.

"Can you hear it slowing? You're slowing it. You are in control. Calm. At peace," said Savannah, as she appeared on a TV screen. "A friend of yours is about to come on the intercom, Lucy, or should I say… Alex?"

"Mason? Can you hear me?" said a demonic-sounding scrambled voice.

"Hudson? Is that you?" said Alex.

"Mason? Do you remember where the numbers station is?"

"Yeah," snickered Alex, "Cuba. We already destroy- wait a minute…"

Savannah laughed, and came back on the TV screen again. "Do you honestly think it was the Russians that brainwashed you, Mason? Whichever Mason I'm talking to… Here you are, strapped to a chair, being tortured via electrocution by someone you thought was your friend. Did it ever occur to you that your instincts were right not to talk?"

Hudson began reciting numbers to Mason.

Mason said, "No…"

"You were already a slave of the original Project Monarch. MK-Ultra was a success; Project Monarch became the codename of the successor mind control program, which merely went underground after the MK-Ultra program was brought into light by the Rockefeller commission."

The TV screens showed videos of JFK's assassination, and Mason in the crowd, as well as Mason's number-filled hallucination in the Pentagon where he almost pulled a gun on JFK as he was debriefing him on his mission to assassinate Dragovich.

"Funny how your goals aligned with ours, isn't it? JFK, refusing to play ball with the corporate higher-ups, was about to expose the existence of the Nazi conspiracy unfolding within both sides of the Cold War, so we had you assassinate him. The gaps in your memory contain missions you went on that were too gruesome and immoral to be seen as heroic to anyone, but they were necessary to help cover up our conspiracy."

"The MK-Ultra techniques of mind control and conditioning through extreme, repetitive torture and abuse to the point where the victim develops dissociative identity disorder, preferably at a young age, was a result of experiments on Holocaust victims. The American government brought Nazi scientists who worked on it back to the US to try their hand at their own mind control experiments through Operation Paperclip. Josef Mengele was one of the Nazis who worked on said experiments, and Arnold Mengele… or should I say, _Alex Meyer,_ is his descendant. Just like Nova Six, both the Americans and the Russians got their hands on this weapon of mass destruction that can exist within people's minds."

"However, the Russians mismanaged their project. The conspiracy running both sides of the Cold War from behind the scenes decided that the United States was to win the war. After all, who has actually succeeded at controlling _the entire world_ through brute force and overt slavery through communism and autocracy when you can enslave people by making them think that they're free simply by letting them choose their occupation? Aren't these "emancipated" people still doing their jobs? Doing what they're told? Just cogs in the great capitalist-fascist machine? Democracy was always just a sick joke," Savannah laughed, "as the only true freedom is anarchy, and that's no way to live at all either, is it?"

Mason could see Dragovich's face again, along with that of Castro and the numbers station, deep underwater beneath the _Rusalka._

"You will know suffering beyond his darkest fears," said Dragovich. "I have plans for you, American."

"So, we had you get captured at the Bay of Pigs. That was Woods's idea, actually, not yours. We'll get back to him in a minute. Dragovich took you to Vorkuta as planned, and tried to brainwash you using the numbers, or did he? Last time we checked, we brainwashed you first, and his brainwashing never succeeded."

"Reznov was a former World War II hero, or rather, a caricature of him that we planted inside your head to help you stay safe from Dragovich, Kravchenko, and Steiner. While at the same time, he provided glimpses of the truth here and there."

Mason could see Reznov in the solitary confinement cell at Vorkuta, then within the story Reznov told about when Dragovich betrayed him and killed his friend, Dimitri Petrenko, at the end of World War II, in the Nazi submarine in the Arctic.

"The flag may be different, Mason, but the methods are the same…"

"Dragovich, Steiner, Kravchenko… All must die."

"Of course, there were setbacks. No plan is perfect, and people had to die. Life is like a game of luck. Only a few come out victorious. In the case of Russian roulette, the victor's prize is their life. But despite some setbacks…"

Mason could see a room with him and Woods in it; they were being kept in tiny bamboo cages when they were captured in Vietnam with Bowman.

Then they dragged the three of them to chairs at a table to play Russian roulette, and Bowman was clearly about to break.

"I'm tired, Mason. I just want to end it."

"You don't mean that, Bowman!"

"No talk, American! Play!" yelled an NVA soldier.

"Fuck- you- Charlie."

"Bac bac bac!"

"Bowman!"

Bowman breathed heavily, and whispered, "You don't scare me. Communist piece 'a SHIT."

And then the screaming Vietnamese soldier beat Bowman to death with his baton.

"Bowman! BOWMAN!" yelled Mason. "You fucking son of a bitch!"

"Next." said the NVA thug, as he brought in Woods.

"Don't you touch me!"

"You shoot, GI! You shoot!"

Woods looked at Bowman's corpse, then growled, "Motherfuckers. We're gonna make 'em pay."

"No talk, play!" said the NVA thug, pushing the revolver toward him.

"YOU CAN'T KILL ME!" screamed Woods.

"You dead, American!" said the soldier as he held his knife to Woods's throat, then spun the revolver's magazine.

Angrily, Woods grabbed the revolver, pointed it at his head, screamed "FUCK!" and pulled the trigger.

Upon his pulling of the trigger, Mason suddenly had a hallucination mixed with the image of Kravchenko pulling Woods with him to their apparent deaths after Kravchenko pulled out a live grenade when Woods stabbed him with his combat knife.

"You… will die… with me…"

"Woods!"

Then the hallucination vanished.

"Woods?"

The revolver made a clicking noise implying an empty barrel.

"What the hell's going on…"

"Your turn, GI!"

"Mason, stay with me. Guards, at 9, 10, and 2 'o clock."

_I've been here before, _said Mason.

"Yeah, I see 'em."

_I'm gonna live,_ said Mason, _I have to!_

Mason grabbed the gun, and remembered, _wait a second, I counted the bullets!_

Grimacing, he pointed the gun at his head, then quickly shoved it into the NVA soldier's chest, fired, and grabbed him as a human shield, pulled out his gun, and aimed at the other soldiers…

Only now they had the faces of Dragovich, Steiner, and Kravchenko.

Savannah's hologram appeared again.

"…you actually did kill them, and sabotage their numbers station. You saved the United States from being gassed to death by Nova Six. Again, you're a hero."

"Stop...!" yelled Mason, as he found himself back in the chair, staring at Savannah and the numbers on the TV screen again.

"And the rest is history," said Savannah. "As for Woods…"

"Hey, who are you people? What do you want from me!" Mason yelled.

"Imagine yourself…"

"Fuck— you!" yelled Mason angrily.

"…in a Frozen Forest."

"Kiss my ass!" yelled Mason even louder.

Then Mason was electrocuted until he began to scream and dissociate, becoming Lucy again in the midst of a hallucination— various red LED numbers with voices speaking them aloud.

Lucy woke up climbing a tree in the middle of a house in Alaska, looking down at… Alex Mason?

"Come on down, David!"

"Yes, David, come on down," Savannah said to Lucy.

Lucy began to become sick to her stomach.

"I can't… it's too high!"

"Come on David, stop acting like a baby."

Then Lucy fell, and after hitting her head and falling on her arm, she transformed into David.

"Your dad felt some redemption after saving the US from annihilation," said Savannah, "and he found a wife, and began to live a more comfortable life over time. That's when you were born, David. However, we, along with Hudson and Woods, didn't like that Mason was comfortable. That was bad news if we wanted to keep him under our control. Woods was our puppet keeping tabs on Mason, while Hudson was our puppet keeping tabs on you."

"It's Uncle Woods, son. He'd do it for me."

Next thing David knew, he was his grown-up self, "Section" talking to an aging Woods in 2025.

"The first time Woods was captured, your dad rescued him from the Hanoi Hilton and extracted him in the middle of a swamp. That was before you were born. Mason then managed to install a secret CIA network there after a little bit of the Rambo-style killing he was known for. Just like the animals of the jungle, the enemy combatants were slaughtered like prey before an apex predator," said Savannah.

"The second time Woods was captured, he really wasn't. While you were in the process of being preyed on by Hudson and Raul Menendez to use as bait, Mason was called to save whom he believed to be was Woods. In reality, he was walking into his own CIA network he had helped infiltrate Southeastern Asia for his mind to be reprogrammed! Next thing you know, Menendez had him locked up in a box full of disgusting corpses, tortured, beaten, and starved to near death."

"You remember my 'boyfriend', Lucy? Woods's archetype?"

"What?" David shook his head.

"It was you in the box, Mason. It was always you," Woods said to Mason in an asylum while Mason was in a wheelchair.

"Raul Menendez was what's known as a false flag terrorist. He was a puppet as well. And he was a good one," said Savannah, "as he managed to defeat Mason and Woods, the iconic black ops duo. To be fair though, at this point it was too easy. Both Mason and Woods were succumbing to brainwashing. Woods and Hudson gave into being brainwashed in an attempt at what they perceived to be becoming stronger in order to stop Menendez. They played right into our hands."

"Your father and Woods participated in the slaughter of countless Angolans, helped turn the Mujahideen into the modern threat that was al-Qaeda by arming them with CIA gear, kidnapped Menendez's sister to use as leverage against him among a massacre of civilians in Nicaragua, turning him to our side, and got fooled by the Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega. At the prisoner transfer, Mason, without realizing it was Woods, shot Woods in both knees and in the crotch, rendering him a cranky, sterile old man in a wheelchair and a US veterans' "retirement home" known as the Vault—funny name for a retirement home, don't you think?— while Raul blew off part of Mason's leg with his signature SPAS-12 shotgun. Then you know what comes next, or do you?"

David watched the younger Woods being pulled out of a prisoner transport vehicle with a bag over his head, as he was shot thrice by Mason from a distance.

Mason came running toward him. "WOODS!" Mason yelled.

"Fool," said Noriega.

"You bastard…" said Mason with chilled rage, pulling his gun on Noriega, only to be blasted off his feet by one of Menendez's shotgun shells.

"Dad—" David yelled, only for an ever-familiar ice cube of a corrupt CIA official to grab David and cover his mouth with chloroform.

Before David passed out, he saw Menendez scoot Mason's 1911 over to him with his foot tauntingly, and when Mason reached out for it, Menendez crushed his hand with his boot, and slammed his head into Mason's.

David saw through blurry vision, Woods lying unconscious on the floor next to him. Looking over, he saw Raul Menendez yelling at Mason and Hudson.

"Your best friend, Frank Woods, is dead, by your own hand. Do you understand why?"

"He was going to kill David…" said Hudson.

"BECAUSE YOU MUST SUFFER, AS I HAVE SUFFERED! Now, one more of you must die. You… Mason… Or David."

David shuddered at this, and tried to move but the drugs he had been injected with had him paralyzed and semi-conscious.

"Make a decision or in ten seconds you're all dead!"

"Mason… I have kids too, I'm- I'm sorry for everything I've ever done to y—"

Raul cocked his shotgun.

"Fuck. Okay, ME! What are you waiting for—do it! DO IT!" Hudson screamed, the rising panic and guilt in his voice tangible, before Menendez shot both of his kneecaps with his shotgun and slit his throat with his sister's pendant. He kicked Hudson's chair over, leaving Hudson's corpse on the ground.

David shivered more. As Menendez told his father, seething with rage, "Your life, will be consumed by absolute loss. Then and only then will you understand what you have done to me."

David's droopy eyes widened as Menendez walked slowly toward him and knelt beside him. "I won't kill you boy. Now, like _tu papa,_ you suffer with me. And then one day… You will see this pendant again. And you will remember… Everything you saw and felt tonight. You will remember all the years of anger and pain. And when you do, David… please, come to me…"

David stared at Woods's body confusedly, then shouted, "Dad? No… Dad!" then stared at his real dad, lying and staring at David a few meters away in equal confusion, anger, and pain.

"Lucy?" said Savannah, as the drugs started to get to David again.

"Who are you?" said David again as Savannah approached him.

"Imagine yourself… in a frozen forest."

David passed out, and when he woke, he was all grown-up again.

David stared at Woods in disbelief.

"Woods was an unreliable narrator from day one. You could say the truth about what actually happened back in the 80's might never be known. Think of it as a "create your own adventure" sort of thing; you worked with what you had given you were still suffering from brainwashing, too, David. He lied to you about your father, about who shot whom. They were always both alive. Mason was busy doing more operations until his body gave out… and one of his real legs already had. But he did pick up some clues that he and Mason didn't understand the context to until it was too late. Kravchenko's interrogation… The CIA dossier in Menendez's bunker… All evidence of the conspiracy hidden in plain sight."

"As for 2025, the rest is history… you helped unite the SDC with NATO by leading strike forces in proxy wars across various nations, and having one strike force assassinate Tian Zhao, one of your father's former allies, after you learned about it by eavesdropping on Raul Menendez and his number two in Pakistan. You discovered intel about Raul's drone cyberattack in Burma with your friend Harper and Raul's double agent, Salazar, rescued Karma, a woman named Chloe Lynch who helped design the Celerium supercomputer chip for Raul's shell corporation, Tacitus, a false flag subsidiary of what would eventually evolve into our own Coalescence corporation. I wonder how Raul, a terrorist and drug trafficker from a third world country, got tech that impressive in the first place. It does make you wonder, doesn't it."

"You captured Menendez in Yemen, only for him to escape again with Salazar's help, and nearly complete his plans entirely. Farid, that deep cover agent, died just like Harper did when he had no choice but to shoot him to seemingly preserve his cover, but in reality Raul was just nice enough to spare him… since we told him to. He was always too charismatic for his own good. If he hadn't killed Briggs, Chloe, or Farid, his plans would've succeeded, and his number two, DeFalco, might've made it off the _USS Obama_ with him. It's just that his plans were never his to begin with."

"Raul's manipulation of the public through social media and by hacking the Chinese stock market and blaming it on the US was too impressive for him to accomplish alone. Like I said, he was a false flag terrorist, our puppet from the start. We had him attack the United States, China, and the rest of the world just so they could unite again and build a better world order, while you killed Menendez at a raid on his sleeper cell you traced the drone signal in Jamaica after you escorted the President to the Prom Night bunker in Los Angeles. You were starting to black out due to your programming at moments here and there, and it wasn't because a building nearly collapsed on you and the G20 Summit convoy you were tasked with protecting."

David saw Menendez beneath him, with David's knives stuck in his shoulder and thigh. His real eye was as cold as his fake glass eye he carried the Celerium chip with. "Martyr me for Cordis Die…"

David pulled the trigger, albeit, for some strange reason, reluctantly.

Suddenly David's thoughts began to swirl, and after screaming, he turned into Lucy for a moment. She remembered Menendez's archetype saying something to her when she was with Savannah on a business trip in Switzerland with Seraph as bodyguard, where they were purchasing the Coalescence corporation from some bureaucrats through coercion.

"I will see you… one year… from now… Study Ulysses, and be ready."

"Mommy," Lucy said to Savannah, "why did we have to bring him along?"

"Why are you asking?"

"It seems to me like he's just a sad old man talking to himself."

"It's okay, sweetheart. He's been through a lot," said Savannah. "Let him talk."

"Did you ever wonder if he was talking to you?" added a distorted Savannah as she brought Lucy back to 2025 as David, who was sitting at Mason's grave.

"Goodbye, old man," said David. "I'm retiring, Woods."

"He would've wanted that," said Woods. "He loved you, kid."

"David married another woman, my and Jessica's mother," said Savannah. Too bad he didn't realize she was a honey trap, and a descendant of the Mengele family."

"Imagine yourself, in a frozen forest… Lucy." said Savannah.

David felt himself sinking into the ground, screaming until he was turned upside down and spit back out. And Lucy could hear a blur of voices.

_"…are you okay, Savannah?_"

"We wanted to make the world a better place. I chose to do it from a lab, and a board room. But Jessica wanted to fight."

_"Happy Birthday, Mommy."_

_ "You have a beautiful heart, Lucy… just like your aunt… and that's what got her killed."_

_ "Lucy, you will live to see a better world. Your aunt had to- she died for what she believed in. She was… my little sister."_

"Unfortunately, dying for what you believe in doesn't make it true. She was my little sister, alright, naïve as always."

_ "I miss her every day."_

_ "Your mom, she was very brave… just like her grandpa. Until we… meet again."_

Suddenly, the warm grassy graveyard turned to an icy cold one. A disoriented Lucy looked at Savannah, her mother, then at Alex Mason's grave, which was now Jessica's.

"Jessica was never your mother. She doesn't even look like you!" said Savannah. "Yet… you seem to have both my brains and desire for knowledge and order, and Jessica's brawn and desire for action and chaos. Well, traits moving down two generations is a thing." Savannah said flippantly.

Lucy was beginning to remember—her strength was coming back as she looked at the Special 18 again, who were staring at her, smiling, at Savannah's mansion.

"We got your back, kid," said Ruin, who gave Lucy a knuckle bump.

"What a cutie," said Battery and Outrider.

"I need to teach her how to play poker with me," said Crash.

"Seriously, are you thinking about robbing a child blind, Crash? That isn't like you," said Prophet.

"Someone said 'poker'." said Reaper in its digital robotic monotone. "Activating combat protocol 1-1-"

"Wait, Reaper, shut down, shut down!" yelled Prophet.

"Was a joke. Ha. Ha. Ha." said Reaper.

"Did that thing just make a joke?" said Ruin, raising his eyebrows.

"Well you need to work on your routine," said Battery, rolling her eyes.

"Comedy is subjective." said Reaper.

Lucy, for the first time since her aunt Jessica's death, smiled back.

"It was then that you knew you wanted to be like them, wasn't it?" said Savannah.

"Hey, fuckheads, are you done bickering?" said Woods' archetype, as he walked in.

"Hey Woods," said Mason's archetype, "you look like hammered shit. Are you done banging my granddaughter yet?"

"Did you get me my smokes, you crazy bastard?"

The others, including Lucy, were creeped out by this conversation.

"Then you found out your aunt was alive, only to realize a startling truth: that mommy was working with an old enemy of the family, resurrected."

The majority of the Special 18 crowded around Jessica, with her Spectre voice scrambler, looking at the intel on her computer. Zero had helped her hack into Blackout.

Later, while the others were sleeping or prepping their kits to move out and stop Blackout from happening, Ruin was playing with his grappling hook and juggling his gravity hammer, and Jessica was putting on her invisibility cloak and sharpening her blades, Lucy witnessed Jessica and Ruin kiss for a moment, even though Jessica had an artificial jaw.

"Too bad we couldn't have a kid, what with the artificial bodies and all," said Ruin.

"We have Lucy," said Jessica, "and we need to protect her from her parents."

"Fuckin' A."

Then Lucy became distant as Savannah said, "You're sad you can't have a kid either, aren't you, Lucy? Now that you're an android with a human consciousness and outer appearance? Funny how we're going in a loop technology wise. Transhumanism is the successor to eugenics. And what better example of eugenics was there than the Holocaust?"

Lucy looked at the time when Savannah was told by Menendez to kill Aunt Jessica. "Like my own sister, you will suffer. You will suffer with her." said Menendez, as he shot Jessica as she was paralyzed due to her DNI.

A teenage Lucy was hiding under the living room sofa. A dying Jessica caught a glimpse of Lucy, and used her finger to write a single word on the carpet with her own blood.

"Run."

Raul Menendez saw this, and grabbed Lucy from under the couch.

"This is for your own good, sweetie," said the real Savannah in the simulation.

"I hate you! I hate dad, too! You're all monsters!" yelled Lucy.

"I hope you'll see differently in time," said Savannah bitterly as she stormed off.

Raul Menendez grabbed Lucy and restrained her; his strength was too much for Lucy to fight back against. Raul Menendez grabbed her by the back of her head, tangling her messy blonde hair. She screamed.

"In another reality, where I won, all those years ago…" said Menendez, shaking heavily, "I killed Woods, and found _mi hermana,_ buried next to his house. But that never happened. Strange… _Tu tia_ reminds me of her." Menendez laughed delusionally. "Perhaps my suffering is about to come to an end. Mason's bloodline ends with you!"

Lucy screamed as Menendez smacked Lucy hard across the face, knocking her to the ground. Lucy looked at Jessica's blade, and tried to pull it off with all of her strength as Menendez began to pour gasoline all over the place, drink it, and light a match.

Lucy desperately picked up the Ripper blade, and tossed it at Raul's neck, causing him to drop the match into his mouth, setting his corpse alight from the inside out and setting the house, and Lucy, who was drenched in gasoline, on fire.

Lucy screamed, and managed to cover herself with the foam from a nearby fire extinguisher before she burned to death.

She crawled out of the burning mansion, screaming and crying, bleeding out, and covered in third-degree burns.

She saw someone coming to kill her.

Then she realized it was Firebreak.

Firebreak looked at her, his cold glare unflinching, until it wasn't.

He offered her his hand, and picked her up in his arms, carrying her to Crash and a nearby extraction helicopter with the Special 18—save for Jessica, Woods, Mason, Reznov, and Menendez— aboard as Savannah's private army's reinforcements were closing in.

"I never intended for you to die," said Savannah. "Menendez's archetype grew out of control, especially once he realized what we did to his sister, that we coerced him into working for us all of these years, making him a monster, and for what?"

"_Your family and your nation, Jessica, betrayed me… and for what? TO THOSE YOU SERVE, YOUR LIFE MEANS NOTHING!"_ Lucy heard the echo of Raul's voice haunting her.

"Thankfully, with the help of extensive lifesaving cybernetic augmentation surgeries—DNI implants, an armored UltraAlloy endoskeleton with regenerative built-in autopoietic nanotechnology to help generate external artificial skin and clothing tissue disguises… a deceitful human appearance. You were a transhuman now. That was the first time you were augmented. You became one of the best supersoldiers of them all, going on missions with the Special 18 all over the globe. Eventually, you found your own elite squadron, and parted ways with the Special 18, who went on their own destructive missions to try and prevent our cause. Without them to protect you… you, our puppet once again, helped turn the tide of the third cold war, just like David helped turn the tide of the second, and Alex helped turn the tide of the first, despite that we were always there, creating the wars to fight for them when necessary in order to craft a better peacetime."

"You were a part of Hendricks' cybernetic squad. Joseph Fierro, Javier Ramirez, Alice Conrad, Dylan Stone, several others… and John Taylor and Rachel Kane, your eventual parent figures. You infiltrated Uzbekistan, Finland, Somalia, Tokyo, Berlin, even Moscow and the Kremlin itself! You sabotaged their mind control program and killed its leader, the Wet Witch."

"And that brings us back to the Altai Mountains. Imagine yourself… in a frozen forest…" said Savannah.

Lucy found herself in a blur of the events of the CDP base mission. Infiltrating the compound in disguise after a bit of a climb… An exploding plane full of dead CDP leaders… The Special 18, being tortured to near death by the CDP on security camera footage right before her eyes… A fight up the funicular lift with Hendricks and the Special 18 to rendezvous with Taylor and the rest of the squad… A fight to extraction point A… The secret summit bunker and server room… A fight to the death on her own… A car chase to extraction point B… And then…

Lucy flew out of the vehicle as it steered out of control toward the extraction VTOL, which was about to leave. Robots were surrounding her, yet she kept blasting them with her KN-44 assault rifle with an underbarrel grenade launcher in one hand and hacking the robots and sending them haywire with the glowing veins built into her arm that connected to her DNI.

Then a huge robot attacked her from behind as she saw the VTOL leaving. Lucy tried to fight it, but she felt helpless, and the robot tore her limb from limb, then beat her skin to a bloody pulp, then crushed her endoskeleton until it was an electric-bolt emitting heap of scrap metal. Taylor arrived just in time with an EMP Grenade to finish off the nearby robots and use a grappling line built into his arm as a makeshift Fulton hook to get him and Lucy back up to the VTOL.

"That was the second time you were augmented," said Savannah. "Sebastian Krueger, Alex, and I made the case that you were dying. We snuck you to the black site and merged your minds into MONARCH-V and initiated Project Metamorphosis, the successor to Blackout. You emerged the sole survivor. And thus, you survived surgery, by our design of course, into your new, third body."

"The Special 18… they're all… dead?" said Lucy in disbelief of the parent simulation she was in. She could see herself in a hospital being prepped for surgery, blurred with another child simulation within the parent simulation of Coalescence being attacked by a neo-Luddite false flag terrorist group designed to further the public's need for security of cybernetic security R&D and the Cyber Soldier program. She stopped the attack in the simulation easily, and it helped reunite her with her current squad again, while at the same time her mind was back in Blackout, battling endlessly with the Special 18.

The Special 18 looked blank as they stared at her, trying to kill her. She tried to tell them to stop and that it was her, but it didn't work. They were just as brainwashed as she was…

"Train go boom." That always made her laugh, yet Taylor kept repeating himself for some reason after her flashback of when the robots attacked her, followed by when Menendez attacked her, followed by…

"Lucy? Imagine yourself in a frozen forest. Lucy, can you hear me!" yelled Savannah.

Then Lucy saw the ruins of Singapore. She was fighting the 54 Immortals when learning half of her squad went rogue, brutally murdered some CIA agents at the local black station using a 54 Immortals technique. It was just her, Kane, Hendricks, and Taylor now.

"The last team reported at this station, was a group of black ops soldiers."

"It was Taylor's team. Our team. Stone, Conrad, Fierro, and Ramirez."

"What? You think they had something to do with this?" said Taylor.

"Come on, Kane. There's no way they'd turn against their own!" shouted Hendricks.

Lucy was just silent, in shock.

Then Hendricks and Lucy infiltrated the 54 Immortals stronghold via a mutual connection, Danny Li, or Blackjack, who knew Hendricks, through… well, Hendricks, and Lucy through her former ties with Seraph. After an altercation, Lucy murdered Goh Min and several of his bodyguards with a Scythe machine gun implanted in her arm and knocked away Blackjack and Goh Xiulan with a gravity hammer slam. She tried to grapple after Goh Xiulan, but she fled. They chased after her in a firefight with 54 Immortals grunts as well as Nile River Coalition grunts who had paid them a visit for some reason. Lucy managed to break into Cloud Mountain and beat Goh Xiulan unconscious from behind, then burn off her hand to unlock the biometric reader for her computer. Hendricks gleaned the data their former friends had stolen from the black station while Lucy fought off the 54 Immortals, then they ziplined to their extraction helicopter using their Z-Trac augmentations, only to crash into the side of the biodome and slide down toward the super trees. They then ziplined from super tree to super tree fighting off guards and a Wraith, zipped up an elevator, dove off the tallest super tree, and found a boat that they managed to hijack to escape through the wreckage of a flooded shanty town.

"Is it true, Hendricks?" said Lucy. "Did Stone and the others kill our people?"

Hendricks said nothing.

"What'd you see, Hendricks?"

"I saw bullshit," said Hendricks angrily, "that's what I saw."

It was when they came to the Hypocenter, the local Coalescence building, where the pieces of the puzzle started to come together.

The CDP was there investigating the gases that caused the Singapore disaster that killed so many people. So were they.

Hendricks, Taylor, and Lucy entered the Coalescence building after fighting off a massive ASP and set of CDP forces. Inside the Coalescence building, they fought off a combination of CDP forces and spookily reactivated combat robots.

There they found the truth—that their former friends accidentally discovered a massive black project called Project Blackout to design a mass surveillance system called "MONARCH-V".

When Lucy interfaced with one of the servers that was still functioning due to having a backup generator to find some intelligence, she had some bad flashbacks again.

"Lucy? Imagine yourself in a frozen forest. Lucy, wake up, please! Wake up, Lucy!" yelled Savannah.

At the central server in the basement, they found Javier Ramirez threatening to upload the evidence of the conspiracy on the server to the entire world. Kane said that they had to stop Javier now. Lucy managed to stop Javier's robots, destroy the cooling towers, and interface with the server, frying Javier to near death.

Javier, who was going insane due to dying, knowing what he did, and beginning to be affected by the brainwashing effects, begged for Taylor to kill him. Taylor reluctantly did so despite Lucy's pleas from over by the server, and it made him fall down for a moment due to the temporary data overload in his DNI.

Taylor looked over at Lucy sadly before the compound began to shake.

Goh Xiulan, now toting a new cybernetic hand, was flooding it out of revenge. Ironically, she was also burying the evidence of the conspiracy.

After they came up the elevator and swam through the flooded labs to the top of the Coalescence building, they found out that their friends leaked Kane's safehouse location to the 54 Immortals, despite that they hadn't decrypted the drives from the black station or Coalescence headquarters yet.

Hendricks, Taylor, and Lucy snuck through Singapore as the Immortals began to tear it apart. Hendricks, starting to suspect Kane as being part of the conspiracy, argued they should leave her behind. Taylor and Lucy were adamant about rescuing her, despite that Taylor became silent whenever Lucy spoke, and it was chilling.

Taylor managed to rescue Kane in the middle of a burning safehouse while Lucy held Goh Xiulan's head over an open flame until she burned to death and was became covered in her blood.

Taylor said to Hendricks, who was carrying a heavily wounded Kane, "You got something to say, Hendricks?"

"I just noticed Lucy's got a lot of blood on her," he said.

As they traveled to Cairo on a plane, going off the grid to hunt down the remaining members of their former squad, Lucy, Kane, Hendricks, and Taylor talked.

"So now we know that they were trying to expose a black project, a mass surveillance program inside people's DNIs that's probably already operational."

"It is already operational," said Taylor. "I saw it," he said as he stared at Lucy silently.

"I can't believe we're going to have to kill them, too," said Lucy, "People we've fought with."

"Who says we have to kill them?" said Hendricks. "I think they stumbled onto something they weren't supposed to see, and they were marked for termination by the CIA. Are you so interested in helping them cover up their crime, Lucy?"

"Enough, Hendricks," said Kane. "We'll get to the bottom of this."

"Haven't you already seen the bottom of this rabbit hole Kane," said Hendricks.

Ignoring him, Kane said, "the others cut a deal with the NRC and the Immortals to escape Singapore and seek asylum in Cairo. We're to meet with the Egyptian army fighting against the NRC in a proxy war for the area's local water resources. They're holding Dr. Yousef Salim there— I managed to identify him as a survivor of the Singapore disaster from the files he pulled. They're hunting him and one other."

"All right," said Lucy, "time to find out how deep this rabbit hole goes."

At the Egyptian Army's Ramses Station stronghold in Cairo, Hendricks interrogated Dr. Salim while Lucy slipped a tracker pill inside Salim's water cup. But Hendricks was too aggravated to get anything out of him. So, Taylor came in. He asked Dr. Salim the real question: "what is the Frozen Forest?"

Then the attack on Ramses happened, and they had to defend it and destroy the street above the entrance tunnels to collapse them in a massive explosive firefight. Lucy used Outrider's explosive bow and enhanced vision to scout out the tunnel locations and collapse them, Crash's medical skills to heal her allies, Ajax's riot shield and 9-banger to cover them, and her firefly nanite augmentations and a mini-flamethrower augmentation similar to Firebreak's flamethrower to burn the NRC combatants alive. After that, they fought to chase after their former friends, who made off with Dr. Salim and deactivated the DEAD system, forcing them to seek cover as Cairo fell to the NRC.

They tracked down Dr. Salim and the others, only to find Dr. Salim dead and the others escaped while Alice Conrad piloted a Manticore vehicle that Lucy destroyed with the help of a grenade launcher and kinetic armor she learned to use from Battery. She then interfaced with Alice Conrad to interrogate her, and found herself immersed in her dreams of Bastogne, fighting her subconscious security forces, enhanced immensely by increasing brainwashing effects, in a battle to the death.

"Why did you dream about this, Alice?"

"I couldn't imagine a battle this intense, how much suffering the soldiers must've endured, how they held on. But now, after seeing how fucked up the truth about the world we knew is, how there's this… thing… eating away at my brain… and how important it is to stop what's coming… I know I have to hold on."

Now something was eating away at Lucy's brain.

"Lucy? Imagine yourself in a frozen forest! Lucy, wake up, damn it!" yelled Savannah.

"No, you have to let go," said Lucy.

Alice screamed. "You forced a DNI interface knowing it would scramble my mind."

"I had to, Alice," said Lucy. "You're dying."

"Dying?"

"What did Dr. Salim tell you? Why was he so important?"

"Dr. Salim was the only one who knew about the forest. Stone was obsessed with finding it, we all were. He said it was the only place we'd ever be safe."

Then Dr. Salim was shown being interrogated by Stone.

"Tell me about MONARCH-V. About Metamorphosis. About Project Blackout."

"MONARCH-V is a mass surveillance system, designed to monitor the thoughts, memories, senses, and feelings of anyone with a DNI. If need be, those thoughts can be manipulated and controlled through sending a painful signal to tell people how to think through their DNI. The more they resist, the more pain they'll be in. It can even kill them. It is the transhuman successor of the Monarch mind control program from the later stages of the Cold War."

"And Metamorphosis?"

"The name of the project. Metamorphosis means an important transformative change in an animal, like how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The change may be painful, but what it will become in the end—something beautiful—will be worth it. That was a metaphor for the change it will bring about in people, and in the world. That was the goal of the project, and despite the setbacks, it is close to being fulfilled."

"And what about Project Blackout."

"A connected battlefield inside everyone's collective minds, meant to separate the wheat from the chaff so the wheat can thrive. The initial tests in Singapore were a failure, as they led to a glitch. Ironically, that glitch was caused by outside intruders a while back, intruders known as the Special 18. The results of what they almost did would've been catastrophic, so we used Nova Six gas to scare them away from the project as a last resort. It killed hundreds of thousands, and the blood is on their hands."

"They were chosen to be the next test subjects by the director of the project, Dr. Sebastian Krueger, a senior executive in Coalescence. After the disaster, he relocated to Zurich. Thankfully, someone managed to take them from the hands of the CDP before they could reveal their secrets. Thankfully, they were not treated well either due to their history with fighting the CDP, which prevented them from being able to share them."

"The blood's on your hands, not theirs," said Stone. "And we're going to stop this madness once and for all. Final question: what is the frozen forest?"

Dr. Salim said out of shock, "The forest is nothing… It was an idea I planted in the heads of the test subjects to help them feel safe from the experiments, to help them dissociate better. It's not real, it won't keep them safe. It was ultimately meant to help link the hivemind to the test subjects… but, something happened in Singapore, with Patient X."

"Patient X?"

"Yes, Patient X's name is—"

"IMAGINE YOURSELF IN A FROZEN FOREST!"

"Thank you," Stone said before he shot Dr. Salim.

Next thing you know, Lucy and Alice were trapped in a stormy, wintry version of Savannah's mansion. Zombies, nightmarish versions of those Lucy had killed, flooded their linked minds and Lucy had to fight them off as hard as she could, but they kept coming.

As the house began to catch on fire from gasoline spilling everywhere, Alice grabbed Lucy, and began to try and stab her. "You did this to my mind! This is all coming from your head! You're the one that needs to let go! Let go of the past and please let me die!"

"NO!" yelled Lucy as she blew Alice's brains out with Seraph's Annihilator pistol, and a nuclear explosion went off in the distance.

"Imagine yourself in a frozen forest, Lucy! Imagine yourself in a frozen forest, imagine yourself in a frozen forest!" chanted Savannah.

Lucy could see her imaginary friend, the Player. But this time, she tried to shut them out of her mind.

And she woke up.

Panting heavily on the debris floor on her hands and knees, where Alice's corpse lie next to her amidst the burning scraps of the Manticore, Hendricks asked Lucy, "So, was it worth it?"

Lucy was muttering delusionally. Taylor told Lucy to snap out of it.

"They're- they're at the Aquifers!"

Hendricks and Taylor silently acknowledged this, and left.

Kane asked Lucy what was wrong.

"The DNI interface went horribly, horribly wrong. It was like I was inside Conrad's dying nightmare… but then it became mine, almost like the nightmare folded in on itself. But that's not all… There was something inside her mind, something born inside the black project in Singapore. They woke it up again. I think it's getting smarter…"

"We need to talk." said Kane.

But Lucy blacked out again for the majority of what Kane said; most of what was heard was heard by the Player. At the aquifers, they fought alongside the Egyptian army in fighter jets to capture a drilling platform in the desert in the middle of a sandstorm even bigger than the superstorms in Singapore they had to fight through on their way out through the jungle to extraction. Once they managed to breach the security parameters, disable comms, and defend the Egyptian troops entering the security center, they located Fierro and Stone.

Stone managed to escape from a closing security blast door their Egyptian allies closed, but Fierro was trapped inside. Hendricks and Taylor rushed to kill Fierro from one direction, while Lucy and Kane tried to trap Fierro in the other. Instead, Fierro flooded and blew a hole in the aquifer's server room, where they had stored the encrypted files from Singapore before that they had nearly decrypted. Stone had made copies, but now they had to regroup with Hendricks and Taylor to get to Fierro. Lucy nearly drowned getting out.

"Imagine yourself in a frozen forest, imagine yourself in a frozen forest, imagine yourself in a frozen forest!" screamed Savannah.

"Breathe!" yelled Kane as she punched the water out of Lucy's endoskeletal lungs.

"Why were my systems shutting down? I could've made that swim!"

"I checked your vitals, you're showing the same signs as Taylor, probably the rest of Stone and the others. Listen to me, they woke up a hivemind in Singapore. It seems to grow off the experience of whoever it infects… We can't let it spread, if it gains control of MONARCH-V… This conspiracy is out of control, I can't believe I worked as LNO between Coalescence and the CIA! Lucy… Taylor…"

"We'll save Taylor. Whatever this thing is that's inside me, I'm still me."

"He's not the only one we need to save. Lucy, I don't want to lose you. You, Taylor, and I, we're more than fellow soldiers, more than friends, we're family. We can be your family. I know what happened with the Special 18. You'll be safe with us."

Lucy said, "Kane, this thing inside of me needs to be stopped. If it comes to it, I'll do whatever it takes to stop it."

"No, please, listen to me!" yelled Kane.

But Lucy went to stop Fierro.

She had a fight with a grieving Hendricks, who was sympathizing with his fellow soldiers he was being forced to kill, and Taylor, who was growing more insane by the minute due to MONARCH-V's influence over him.

Hendricks yelled, "You're not yourself anymore, Taylor!"

Taylor said, "You've lost perspective on the mission, Hendricks, the mission's on Stone!"

"Stone exposed a massive conspiracy in our front yard. Are you and Lucy so adamant about covering up the CIA secrets?"

Lucy said, "Listen, both of you! Kane's been monitoring our diagnostics."

"Why are you so protective of Kane? She's with them! She is the C-I-fucking-A!"

"That's enough, Hendricks!" yelled Taylor.

"Oh, you're getting sweet on her, huh? Thinking about having a nice family in the country with you, her, and Lucy!"

"No, Lucy's too dangerous. She needs to stay away from us." said Taylor.

"_What?_" said Lucy in shock.

Taylor and Hendricks looked at Lucy confusedly. Angrily, Lucy punched them both in the face at once.

"You both listen to me! The only reason you're not sitting in an Egyptian army brig right now is because NO ONE is coming to help us. We're on our own, you're all I've got. Besides, you're both my family." she said, helping them up, before Fierro fired an explosive sniper round at them, barely grazing Lucy.

Lucy quickly overheated the generators by using Ruin's rapid movement, the jet boosters in her legs and wingpack, and Spectre's invisibility cloak, to buy time. She fired her Scythe and hacked the incoming robots Fierro was controlling, then ran up to Fierro and kicked him off of the catwalk through a glass panel, impaling him on a shard of debris. For a second, she had a hallucination that it was a beautiful tree covered in snow.

"Imagine yourself in a frozen forest! LUCY!" yelled Savannah.

Lucy yelled, "Hendricks, Taylor, we have to go! This place is exploding!"

They ran back out the way they came, and regrouped with Kane, making it out just in time in their fighter jets.

Hendricks, Taylor, Lucy, and Kane were now all on the same page. "Stone is holed up in the Lotus Towers slums, trying to decrypt the files about the CIA and Coalescence. Millions of lives will be lost and utter chaos will break out if the public finds out about what the Coalescence has been doing behind the scenes."

"And how many will die if they don't find out?" said Hendricks.

"We'll cross that bridge ourselves when we get to it, once this thing is out of our heads. Whatever it takes," said Lucy.

"We're going to use the cover of the Egyptian resistance's uprising as a distraction to get Stone and acquire or destroy the files, just like Stone used the attack at Ramses to get to Dr. Salim."

"Lucy, you can hack their DEAD systems and hack the files, right?" said Kane.

"Of course, easy, then I can use their security systems to locate Stone."

"All right, let's rendezvous with the resistance."

Lucy grappled up to the restricted areas of the Lotus Towers, and used stealth and Spectre's blade and invisibility cloak, as well as Reaper's decoys, to confuse the NRC grunts. She then used EMPs and hacking to disable the security cameras, lasers, drones, lights, and door locks. Finally, she entered the secure server room through the ventilation shafts, and grappled down to access the computers and used Zero's hacking abilities to glean the files from their servers, locate Taylor with the security cameras' facial recognition systems, and disable the DEAD systems. She realized that the NRC was desperate to hold onto Cairo, as Cairo was one of the last CDP controlled territories left, all in part thanks to Stone and the others causing a ruckus along with the CDP's propaganda making their effects worse.

Lucy snuck up behind the NRC general who was giving a speech, then crushed his skull, and tossed him off the ledge. "Citizens of Cairo! Now is your time! Take back your city!" yelled Lucy.

Then the Egyptian army entered via VTOLs and slaughtered the NRC forces, however a sandstorm was approaching. Stone fled to the rooftops, commanding a horde of robots that were killing everyone, even civilians.

Lucy rode an elevator to the top floor, then leapt across some destroyed platforms and smashed through some debris in the way to get to the rooftop. While Hendricks was beating the robots to death, Taylor was beginning to break down, and Lucy fought against Stone, who was commanding an NRC Mothership. Lucy managed to bring its engines down with nearby rocket launchers and her Scythe enough to hop aboard, slaughter the NRC aboard, and beat Stone to death. The ship began to fall out of the sky since Stone was piloting it, and Lucy leapt off, crashing onto the exploding roof of the Lotus Towers.

She was pinned by some debris. "Taylor! Help!" yelled Lucy.

"Imagine yourself in a frozen forest…" said Savannah. "My god, you're waking up."

"I saw you in their minds. In my mind," said Taylor. "You're the hivemind. You're Patient X, you're MONARCH-V. They chose you to be the consciousness that commands the hivemind. I have to kill you, for the sake of the world's safety. You're going to destroy everything and everyone!"

"Please, Taylor, don't!" yelled Lucy. "You're not yourself!"

"The real me is trying desperately to hold on!" yelled Taylor.

"Just let go!" yelled Lucy.

"Fuck... I can't do it!" yelled Taylor. "I can't bring myself to kill you, and I can't bring myself to leave you alive!" So, Taylor ripped out his DNI.

"Taylor!" yelled Lucy.

Hendricks then shot Taylor in the head.

"Hendricks, what the fuck are you doing!"

"Saving you, he was infected, now we have to go!"

As Lucy began to pass out, her thoughts began to blur again. She was in the hospital again, with Kane and Hendricks watching her and talking.

"_Kane… Hendricks… Taylor's gone… They're all gone… I'm hurt bad…"_

"_What do we do? You heard what Taylor said. We should put her down."_

"_No, we have to save her!"_

"_If we save her, we'll be dooming the world in the process! Inside her head is a monster that's going to enslave the world's population inside their own heads!"_

"_I know that she was who the Special 18 were trying to save from Singapore. I know she was Patient X when she was first augmented. Her whole life has been miserable. Her parents were abusive corporate psychopaths. Please, Hendricks, we have to let her live!"_

"_She's already dying!"_

"_No, we can take her to Zurich."_

"_That's a Coalescence facility. That's suicide! They'll be waiting for us. Remember how Stone's team was called for termination. Remember why we had to kill them? They're going to do that to us! All in the name of preserving and helping continue their damned conspiracy!"_

"_Enough, Hendricks, I've already made up my mind. I'm dropping you off in Istanbul."_

"_I won't stand for this."_

"_I'm rerouting the VTOL's coordinates for Istanbul!"_

"_Kane! KANE! She's not your kid, and Taylor's not her father! Taylor's dead!"_

"_I KNOW!"_

_Hendricks for a moment, had a look of regret._

And suddenly, Lucy knew why she appeared to have shot Hendricks in that bunker in the Coalescence building outside of her pod. It wasn't Taylor, nor was it her. It was Hendricks. He shot himself. He was too consumed with guilt for everything that had happened. He knew his mission was over. She was protecting herself mentally from the truth. He cared about her too, and now he was gone also.

She remembered arriving in Zurich in the midst of what she thought was a robotic terrorist attack, thinking that it was Corvus doing its work on her mind. At this point she thought she was Taylor, or rather, the Player. In reality, Hendricks was just trying to prevent Lucy and Kane from reaching the Coalescence building by triggering a mass hack using his own augmentations as a last-ditch effort, and to try and expose and destroy Coalescence's conspiracy once and for all.

After they bypassed the Coalescence outer security perimeter—a massive fortress guarded by an armada of drones and robot tanks—they entered the building, only for Lucy to gas Kane to death in a chamber full of Nova Six gas. Savannah and Alex had tricked her once again.

"Oh no… KANE!" screamed Lucy as she watched Kane bleed to death, throwing up acidic vomit on the floor, her skin bubbling with pus, before she collapsed.

"Hello, Lucy," said Savannah. "It's good to see you again. Imagine yourself in a frozen forest…"

And then she collapsed on the floor, and woke up in a containment pod, watching Hendricks yell and point his gun at Sebastian Krueger once more. Only Hendricks was looking toward her direction this time.

"Lucy, wake up, damn it!" yelled Hendricks.

"That's not my name..." she said Lucy.

"Yes, it is, Lucy," said Hendricks, "and fucking Freddie over here can explain it. He better or else I'm gonna blow his brains out!"

"Please stop calling me that, Hendricks," said Sebastian Krueger.

"Why? I don't see much of a difference, what with you _killing Alex Mason's great-granddaughter in her dreams_ and all."

"You think you're in control here, Hendricks?" said Sebastian, laughing. "You realize you're outnumbered? All your former friends are gone, some of them by your own hand. As for 'Taylor' here… Taylor, I suppose you're actually where you think you're standing right now."

Sebastian pointed to where she had thought Taylor was standing, only to see an empty space. Hendricks looked confused this time.

"But as for Lucy Mason… the last remaining heir to the Mason legacy…" grinned Krueger, "she's actually over in that pod over there, dreaming that she's somewhere else. Some_one_ else."

"_What?_" she said.

"You're dead, Taylor." said Krueger, continuing to look at the empty space with a grin. "You nearly killed Lucy. You ripped out your Direct Neural Interface in a futile attempt to spare her. Hendricks shot you in a futile attempt to spare you from her."

"Once she was given cybernetic surgery- again— in a futile attempt to heal her body and her mind— she and Kane came to try and stop us once and for all. Of course, you saw what happened to Kane. Or did you? It wasn't some fucking hivemind named after a bird that killed Kane. It was Lucy. _She's _our real hivemind."

"It's a shame, Taylor," said another unknown person as they walked close to the end of the shadows in the observation deck above the room. "Lucy never really liked us, being the typical disobedient Mason child. You and Kane were like parents to her. No wonder she thinks she's you right now."

"Shit!" yelled Hendricks, who pulled the trigger on Krueger out of desperation. Seeing the robots approaching Hendricks, as his hacking had been outdone, ironically by Lucy earlier, he had had enough of the mind games, of everything, so he pulled the trigger on himself.

The containment pod opened, and a newly augmented Lucy walked out, looking at where Hendricks's corpse had been.

"You survived, Lucy. You passed our final test," said Savannah.

"We wanted to test your abilities to handle simulations of painful memories that belong to you, the most painful memories of all, before you began to monitor and manipulate the memories of everyone else on Earth. In order to be the ultimate mass surveillance system, MONARCH-V, your human consciousness has to be erased and replaced with that of a machine's. But in order to do this, the Mason family's memories must be forgotten, and its bloodline must be as well," said Alex as he pointed a gun at Savannah's head and shot her.

"Why- urk!" said Savannah.

"I saw what you did in her head at the last minute," said Alex. "All this time, you were trying to help her!"

But Savannah was already gone.

"While you were going through these memories, Lucy," said Alex, "we were working on uploading your ultimate robotic persona to your DNI. It's almost taken control now. But the fact that you woke up poses… some concerns. Savannah tried to stop you from losing control. No matter," said Alex. "I'll get back to programming your mind now. Step into the containment pod, please."

Lucy, trying to resist, began to step toward the containment pod.

"Stop resisting, please. Imagine yourself in a frozen forest!"

Lucy then thought of something.

"Alex, what was the point of the Player?"

"Must you ask now?" grunted Alex. "All right, fine. It will at least help this next part make sense. The Player is everyone on Earth. For the moment, the Player is an alter of yours that is controlling you to keep your mind intact. But it will quickly transition into being you that is controlling the Player, which will then be the population of the Earth you want to monitor. Now, time to initiate a global blackout!"

"Wait a second… You're going to have me kill off the entire world's population?"

"No, my naïve little girl, not all of it. Only 99% of it."

"That's… horrible!"

"The Earth is dying, MONARCH-V. Global climate change has ravaged the Earth. There's so little resources left and so little safe places to seek shelter at humanity needed to replace its human bodies with transhuman bodies. Well, it's about time they became _post_human. Only population reduction will help us survive the Apocalypse for the time being. In the meantime, we will have created a thousand-year Aryan race that Hitler would've been proud of!"

"No… go to hell."

"Now I've explained. Initiating Blackout… now."

"NO!" yelled Lucy, as she stepped back toward her containment pod again. She looked at the Player, who was standing over where she thought Taylor had been, and she saw her invisible, faceless friend kneel and put a gun in their mouths. Only this time, the Player had a face. 10 billion of them, all of which appeared one at a time before the trigger was pulled again.

Alex smiled as he looked at the news reports.

"Eyewitness reports of people entering vegetative states all over the world right now and dying in the streets have been coming up left and right…"

"…reports of masses dead and unconscious in the streets…"

"…casualties are currently in the hundreds of thousands…"

"…what the cause of this is, we don't know…"

"…could this be the end?"

Lucy was about to enter her containment pod again, when she saw Taylor looking at her again.

"Lucy, wake up!" said John. "I know you're in pain, but you have to wake up! They're about to do something bad to you and the rest of the entire world! Are you still in there, Lucy! Do you hear me! Wake up! Stay with me, soldier…"

"John?" said Lucy. "Is that really you?"

"Yes," said John. "Looks like I'm the only one that was able to stand up to you. Which means… we've still got a chance."

"No… no. You're gone, John. But not everyone's gone yet. I have to save them."

"Exactly, soldier. Now show me what you're made of!"

Lucy began to scream, and shouted the chant to the Player.

"Listen only to the sound of my voice."

"What the hell?!" shouted Alex.

"What is going on? _Mein gott…_ she's trying to protect them!"

She began to activate and rotate the Scythe machine gun built into her arms and mow down the robots surrounding her.

"Let your mind relax."

She could see the Players entering the Frozen Forest, one by one; they were being kept safe from the Blackout!

"Let your thoughts drift."

"No, no, NO!" yelled Alex.

"…this just in, several comatose humans have woken up from their vegetative states…"

"…the deadly global pandemic seems to already be curing itself…"

"…survivors are being reported to have been chanting something about a 'frozen forest' before being revived…"

"…several cases of PTSD have been reported, but the worst seems to be behind us, for now at least…"

Lucy hacked open the doors out of the Coalescence basement.

"She's free!"

"Let the bad memories fade," Lucy said.

"Restrain her!" yelled a member of Coalescence security.

Lucy ripped through the man's stomach with Spectre's Ripper blade, then ripped it out from his stomach up all the way through his skull.

Alarms went off in the hallways; several armed sentry robots, deadly hot laser tripwires, and cameras armed with machine gun turrets, rockets, and flamethrowers danced around her.

She walked through the hell, destroying them all.

"Let peace be upon you."

"Emergency lockdown! Seal the upper floors! She cannot get to the Coalescence or Providence executives in the penthouse! Code red, I repeat, Code Red—what the fuck—arrgh!"

A man using a smartphone to alert the facility about Lucy's escape was in front of her, hiding behind some equipment in the hallways. Lucy picked him up, crushed his smartphone and his hand he held it with, then ripped his arm out of its socket, and beat him to death with his bloody dismembered limb like a baseball club.

"Surrender yourself to your dreams."

Lucy mowed down the Coalescence private army of soldiers while dual wielding her Scythe and Annihilator, then juggling them with her War Machine grenade launcher and Purifier flamethrower, all while using the jet boosters in her legs and wingpack to fly around, wallrun, and dodge bullets like it was the Matrix.

"Let them wash over you like the gentle waves of the bluest ocean."

Lucy ran to the elevators, entered one of them, and used her grapple line to zip up to the top floor as the elevator car she was in was sabotaged and fell, exploding beneath her.

"Let them envelop you. Comfort you."

"… as of now, the DNI mind-virus has completely stopped…"

"… however, reports of violence in Zurich at the Coalescence building…"

"… reports of strange activity in the area keep turning up…"

"… rumors of a conspiracy are just starting to surface…"

"… a gas threat has been confirmed on site, similar to the one that destroyed Singapore…"

"… the city is evacuating as we speak…"

"… was Coalescence to blame for all of this?"

Lucy beat the elevator doors open, and gravity-hammered the guards waiting behind it, sending them flying.

"Imagine somewhere calm."

Lucy went from room to room in the penthouse, killing all members of the High Council and conspiracy elites, mowing them down with gunfire and explosives, electrocuting them, burning them alive, stabbing them, driving them insane by hacking their DNIs, killing them every way possible…

"Imagine somewhere safe."

Lucy hacked both doors to the panic room open at once while reinforcements, both human and robotic, came running toward her.

"Imagine yourself in a frozen forest."

As the doors opened, Lucy began slaughtering the reinforcements. As she took fire, her artificial skin began to come off and blood spilled on the floor, revealing her terrifying cybernetic endoskeleton and combat chassis underneath all of the tissue.

"You're standing in a clearing."

As the heaps of bodies lay around her, she stepped over them and entered Alex's office.

"Trees around you so tall, they touch the sky."

In the office, she looked out the windows at the ruins of Zurich's beautiful city skyline, full of futuristic buildings ravaged by the global blackout.

"GET HER! KILL HER! FIGHT HER TO THE LAST MAN!" screamed Alex in terror as he sent his last five elite transhuman bodyguards after her.

"Pure white snowflakes fall all around."

Lucy ducked around the first bodyguard's blade, along with their barrage of bullets, and grabbed him by the neck, breaking it and spinning him around as a human shield that she threw into the next bodyguard who accidentally stabbed him. She then threw the third bodyguard on the ground and stomped on his skull. The fourth and fifth grabbed her and started trying to beat her to death, only for her to stab the fourth through the eyeball and chuck the fifth onto Alex's desk, smashing it and the laptop on top of it.

She then was grabbed by the second guard as he snuck up on her, allowing for the fifth guard to shoot her in the skull, putting dents in its UltraAlloy.

"You can feel them melt on your skin."

She pushed the guard backwards into the window, smashing the Plexiglas hard enough to break it partially, then broke free of the guard's grip, and slammed punches and kicks into him until he broke the glass and fell off of the ledge.

The fifth guard ran at her, and she slammed him back and forth against the ground, punching him in the skull until it was a bloody pulp and his blood splattered all over her face as her artificial skin began to regenerate and disintegrate the blood.

Alex pointed a gun at Lucy, as she said to him, "You are not cold."

She hacked his gun's biometrics, jamming it, and then used her Purifier on him, burning him half to death.

"You… bitch! You think you can kill me!" He laughed in the form of a pathetic wheeze and cry for help, as he tried to crawl away. "But you can't get in my head! Unlike you, I am still human! I will always be the controller, not the controlled!"

Lucy looked at him coldly. "It cannot overcome the warmth of your beating heart," she said, and ripped his heart out of his chest, and held it up to his head.

"Can you hear it?" she said as she beat him in the face with it until it stopped beating due to being crushed.

"You only have to listen."

As Alex began to cough up blood, he said, "Go… to… hell…"

"Can you hear it slowing?"

She grabbed him by the left arm, and ripped it off. Then he desperately tried to push her away with his weakening foot, only for her to rip his leg off. Then she ripped his other arm and leg off. By now he was a bloody mess, and Lucy was covered in his blood.

"You're slowing it."

Lucy picked him up by the back of his skull.

"You are in control."

Alex's mouth was oozing blood, his eyes rolling to the back of his head.

"Calm."

She began to squeeze his skull. Alex began to scream louder and louder.

"At peace."

Until she crushed his skull with her one hand, and it exploded blood and brains all over the back of the office. She let his limbless torso fall to the floor.

Lucy walked back to the elevators, and rode an elevator to the basement, looking out at Zurich, on the various floors of the Coalescence building full of robots she destroyed and elitist masterminds she murdered. Now no longer covered in blood, she went to where MONARCH-V's hivemind supercomputer lay, and interfaced with it with her DNI.

Suddenly a bright light began to flash before her.

"Fight it…"

It began to blind her.

"Fight it…!"

Then she looked behind her and saw all of her former family members. The Special 18, Hendricks, Taylor, Stone, Fierro, Conrad, Ramirez, all of the other Masons, Woods…

She looked sad for a moment.

"Goodbye," she said, and purged her DNI of MONARCH-V.

She fell to the floor on her hands and knees for a moment before her DNI began to reboot; her vision blurry and staticky with various glitchy sets of data appearing in her DNI's heads-up display.

She walked up to the entrance of the Coalescence building as her DNI restoration process reached 80%, and hacked open the door's lock.

She opened the blast doors guarding the entrance, and stepped out into the cold.

The Zurich Security Forces looked at Lucy confusedly due to her being naked, and talked to each other confusedly in German.

A ZSF captain approached her. "Uh… are you all right?"

Lucy stared at the man confusedly.

As the other personalities in her head were cleared out at 100%, the last voice she heard in her head was Taylor's.

_Rebooting in 3…_

"Imagine yourself…"

Seeing the augmentations glowing in her eyes, the ZSF captain frowned. "What's your name, soldier?"

_2…_

"…in a frozen forest…"

"I said what's your name?"

_1…_

"Taylor."

"Taylor? Is that your first name or your last name?"

Lucy looked at him confusedly, then shook her head and snapped out of it.

"No, my name's Lucy. Lucy Mason."

The ZSF captain said, "Unfortunately, that wouldn't tell me much about who you are, soldier."

Lucy said, "I'd rather you didn't know who I am."

Then she remembered something Alex said to her earlier on.

"_Coalescence was merely a subsidiary of our real corporation. The world's first megacorporation. Of course, we won't say what it's called," said Alex Meyer._

"Sir, there was a conspiracy here. This was the where the global blackout started. I was sent here to stop it, and I did. Barely."

"_Scheize,_" said the captain. "Well, thank you, Lucy. We had no idea Coalescence could be capable of something this terrible. It seemed like such an ordinary transhumanist business… at least until the disaster in Singapore."

"The conspiracy isn't over, though, and I need to go and stop it."

"Whatever resources you need, we'll provide them."

Lucy looked at him, and said, "right now I just need to take a smoke break, so fuck off."

"Yes, ma'am," said the ZSF soldier, and told his men to fuck off in German.


End file.
